


No replacement

by shorter_than_hammo_and_clara



Category: The Thick Of It RPF
Genre: Gen, based on the time Ollie was in hospital for something, just realized it was appendicitis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-15
Updated: 2014-09-15
Packaged: 2018-02-17 12:17:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,342
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2309369
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shorter_than_hammo_and_clara/pseuds/shorter_than_hammo_and_clara
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ollie is hit by a car but Malcolm refuses to replace him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	No replacement

**Author's Note:**

> My brain did this.
> 
> NOTE: NO SWEARING BECAUSE I DON'T LIKE WRITING SWEARY BITS. If you want it to sound a bit more like The Thick of It, just imagine every instance of the word 'flip' as a swear word.
> 
> Hope you enjoy.

Malcolm hadn't meant to get that angry. It was just that he'd been late for work and everything had gotten messed up then, to make matters worse, Ollie had absolutely mucked up an important email. So no wonder he was fuming when he practically dragged Ollie into his office.  
"Oliver Reeder!" he had yelled "Explain this!" He waved a stack of papers in front of Ollie's face. Ollie looked helpless.  
"I just wrote the wrong thing, Malcolm. It was all just a misun-" he stammered.  
"It's always just a misunderstanding, isn't it?" Malcolm raised his voice an octave to imitate Ollie. "Sorry, it was all just a misunderstanding, Malcolm. I just managed to mess up the most important thing I've ever had to do," He reverted to his normal voice. "WELL, GUESS WHAT, REEDER? GUESS WHAT? YOU ARE A USELESS, SNIVELING IDIOT! I'M PUTTING YOU ON 2 WEEKS UNPAID, YES, UNPAID, LEAVE. AND YOU KNOW WHY I'M NOT FIRING YOU, REEDER? BECAUSE I'M BEING KIND. TOO KIND. NOW GET OUT OF MY SIGHT BEFORE I STRANGLE YOU WITH YOUR OWN OPTICAL NERVE!"

**********************************************************************************************************************************************************

Ollie walked through the DoSAC carpark. Rain was pouring down, obscuring his vision. As he walked he muttered under his breath.  
"Idiot idiot idiot idiot idiot idiot idiot idiot idiot idiot idiot idiot idiot idiot idiot idiot," He didn't quite know if he was describing himself or Malcolm. He just felt an overwhelming anger. Why did Malcolm always have to be so intolerable? And why did he always have to- ow that hurt that flipping hu- wait, he was flying through the air what was going on what's going-  
Everything faded to black.

**********************************************************************************************************************************************************

Malcolm was sulking in his office when out of the corner of his eye he thought he saw a figure sent flying by the force of a speeding car.   
"No," he said to himself. "You're seeing things, genius," He paused, and in that moment he heard a loud and prolonged scream, then a heavy thud. Malcolm's eyes widened.  
"Ollie?" he whispered. He ran to the carpark but he couldn't find ANYONE lying on the ground, much less Oliver Reeder.  
"That's right," he realized "He was flung into the air by the force of the car hitting him!" He ran to the bit of pavement just across the road from DoSAC. Where was he where was- he spotted Ollie lying on the ground about a meter away.  
"OLLIE!" Malcolm Tucker screamed the word for all the world to hear.

**********************************************************************************************************************************************************

Ollie was lying on his back when Malcolm got to him. His glasses had been smashed and had pierced the skin of his nose. Also, there was a small splat of blood surrounding where his head lay. But apart from these two injuries, Malcolm would have been forgiven for thinking that Ollie had just gotten very very drunk and passed out on the street. It had happened. Crazy night, that. Good thing he was light enough to carry back to DoSAC, where he had spent the night.  
"STOP THINKING OF STUFF!" Malcolm realized that his attention was no longer on Ollie's lifeless body. "A MAN IS DYING HERE, AND YOU'RE THINKING OF THE TIME HE GOT DRUNK!"  
He put his hand on Ollie's chest. The steady heartbeat greeted his hands, and he was sure Ollie's chest was going up and down.  
"Ollie, Oliver, Ollie Reeder, can you hear me? Can you hear me, Ollie? Please, just, say yes," He held Ollie's hand. "Ollie, if you can hear this, squeeze my hand," But Ollie's hand stayed still and cold. Malcolm whipped out his phone and dialed emergency services.

**********************************************************************************************************************************************************

The next half-hour was a blur. The ambulance came and they had to almost literally DRAG Malcolm off Ollie. As he sat in the ambulance, Malcolm wondered what had triggered this sudden attack of compassion. He decided in the end that, despite the fact that his employee and (maybe, just maybe, friend) was one of the most vexing people in the world and often made stupid mistakes in important work, he was... nice? Malcolm had never thought that about him before. Slimy worm, he was sometimes, yes, but he could be nice sometimes. One in a million, maybe. But yes, Oliver Reeder had a nice streak in him. Which was more than could be said for SOME members of DoSAC, ahem. At the actual hospital, they made him sign a bunch of forms then decided then he had to wait for what seemed like an entire day but was really only about two hours.   
Malcolm didn't know what to do with his two hours. He read a few leaflets, but that felt wrong when Ollie might be dying. Then he got up and started pacing around the waiting room. Ten steps this way, turn, ten steps the opposite way. It helped to pass the time and let him think of what was happening. Should he call the other DoSAC people? What if they all immediately wanted to come? That would be bad for both Ollie and the day to day running of DoSAC. On the other hand, he'd been gone nearly three hours now. They might call the flipping police.  
In the end, Malcolm rang up Jamie McDonald and told him of Ollie's predicament.  
"What, that slimy worm?" Jamie sneered. Even on the phone, Malcolm could hear his disdainment.  
"No, Jamie, the badger! YES, the 'slimy worm'!" he retorted. He didn't feel like letting anyone take Ollie's accident lightly.   
"Well you won't catch me visiting him any time soon," muttered Jamie.  
"Other people might want to know, eh, Jamie, so pass on the message but tell them not to come to the hospital because I don't even KNOW what's happened to him yet. So tell them but don't let them come," He hung up, and fell back on the soft waiting room chairs, staring at the doorway. He had the crazy idea that if he stared for long enough, the doctor might come in and tell him that Ollie was just alright. His hopes were dashed when the doctor came in looking grim.  
"Mr. Tucker? Mr. Reeder is in a coma,"

**********************************************************************************************************************************************************

Malcolm suddenly felt like the whole world was spinning around him. He had to take a few deep breaths to calm himself down.  
"What exactly happened?" He felt as though he was choking when he asked that, but at least he had managed to get it all out in one go.  
"From what we can discern from his body, he was hit by a medium-speed car while crossing the road, which bruised his hip and broke one of his fingers on impact. The impact was hard enough to send him flying through the air. He landed on his front, which might had saved his life, but then rolled onto his back, where his head hit a sharp rock or some other such thing and pierced the scalp, causing quite a bit of bleeding but thankfully not much else. As it is, he's broken three ribs, his leg and his arm,"  
Malcolm tried to comprehend the information. Ollie Reeder... hit by car... flung into the air... three ribs, a leg and an arm broken... coma.  
"Can I... see him?" he asked the doctor.  
"Sure," the doctor replied, and led him to a room with lots of machines and beeping things.

**********************************************************************************************************************************************************

Oliver Reeder was lying on a pearly-white hospital bed, looking pale and blanched. His right leg was in a cast and elevated, and both his left arm and his chest were bandaged up and in casts as well. There was a drip and a blood transfusion thing attached to his right arm, stabbing straight into a vein. But Malcolm felt like there was something different about him somehow. Not the lack of glasses, he'd already accounted for that. It was just... what was it what was it what was-  
"Doctor?" he asked "Yes, Mr. Tucker? You can call me Dr. Addison,"  
"Doc- Mr. Addi, I mean, Dr. Addison, why have you shaved his head?" Ollie's head had been shaved. He wasn't bald, exactly, but he didn't look like him. His normal hair was curly and went all over the place, but now that his head had been shaved it stuck straight up and looked neat. Well, neater.   
"Remember when I said about the head injury? We had to shave his head to do the stitches," Malcolm nodded silently.  
"When do you think he'll be out of the coma, Doctor?" he asked. The doctor shook his head and looked grim.  
"Could be anything ranging from now to never," he replied. 

**********************************************************************************************************************************************************

At first, Malcolm thought that it'd be like in the the books or something, and Ollie would wake up within a day or two, and they'd have a happy reunion or some other childrens' book bull. But that didn't happen, and the days turned into weeks. To his pleasant surprise, however, Nicola and Jamie both came to see Ollie, although the latter bought a balloon which said "Good flipping riddance," Ah well, thought Malcolm, better than nothing.   
In the meantime, Malcolm stopped himself from having a heart attack over Ollie's predicament simply by engulfing himself in work. He took over Ollie's job, and rejected any suggestions of finding a replacement.   
"Ollie's going to wake up soon," That was his excuse every single time the suggestion was made. The truth was, Malcolm couldn't even THINK of replacing the 1.8m, curly haired, bespectacled man, even if he was a coward and a bit of an idiot. There was just SOMETHING about DoSAC that couldn't be changed.

**********************************************************************************************************************************************************

A month had passed since the accident, and hospital visits to Ollie's bed had become almost non-existant, except for Malcolm, who visited him every night after work, with antidotes about what had happened that day. Dr. Addison had said that talking to coma patients helped.  
"Nicola got annoyed today because she had to write a speech for tomorrow, you know, the press conference, and she was effing and blinding all over the place and she yelled 'Why the flip can't flipping Ollie flipping do it?' Dead silence. So that's another reason you should wake up, so she can swear at you to your face instead of to everyone else," Malcolm noticed that Ollie's hair had grown out again now. Instead of short, straight, sticky-up bits it was slightly-shorter-than-before-the-accident, curly and went all over the place. Malcolm felt like he'd been punched in the stomach by a yobbo. When Ollie didn't look like Ollie he could pretend that it wasn't really Ollie, but now the harsh reality stabbed him in the throat, and suddenly he couldn't breath, couldn't speak, couldn't make himself leave or stay. Something was building up inside him. He was a volcano about to explode.  
"OLLIE! OLIVER REEDER! WAKE THE FLIP UP YOU FLIPPING IDIOT! STOP DOING THAT! STOP DOING THE THING WHERE YOU JUST LIE THERE! STOP IT AND WAKE UP! JUST DO IT! I'M YOUR BOSS AND THIS IS AN ORDER!" he screamed, letting everything out. From the corner of his eye he saw the doctors and nurses approaching, but he didn't care.  
"OLLIE PLEASE! JUST WAKE UP! HOW HARD IS IT?" His voice broke from the combined strain of screaming and the fact that he was about to cry. "Ollie, please, just wake up. Just do it Ollie, please. I mean it, I swear, I-" And he was getting dragged out by the doctors and nurses but still he was screaming.   
"Sir, you have to leave now, you're disturbing the patients," said a nurse, with a disapproving expression. Malcolm felt rage bottling up inside him again, and once again he couldn't control it.  
"THEY'RE FLIPPING COMA PATIENTS! DON'T YOU WANT THEM TO FLIPPING! WAKE! UP?!" And now Dr. Addison was on him.   
"Mr. Tucker, I understand you're quite close to Mr. Reeder, close enough to call him by his nickname?" he whisper-asked. Malcolm nodded.  
"Would Oliver Reeder want to see you like this?"

**********************************************************************************************************************************************************

The world was dark and cool and quiet, except for the occasional beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Wait, they weren't occasional. They were regular. The smell of medicine and sterile surroundings. Where was he? Why was everything so peaceful? He tried to think back to his last recorded memory. What was it? Oh yes. Malcolm had been yelling at him and had given him 2 weeks unpaid leave. He'd been walking across a road. Then bang and flying and then... now. How long had it been? To him it had just been an instant but he could have been unconscious. He probably had been unconscious, because he was lying on a bed or something soft and last thing he knew he had been flying. Could he open his eyes? Should he? A sliver of light yes yes yes he was doing it and no it's too bright much too bright everything's white and no just no. Wait, did he hear screaming? Who was it and what was happ- wait, was it him? It MUST be him because his mouth was open and someone was leaping onto him, telling him to calm down and be quiet. He didn't know what was going on and it scared him. He tried to think, tried to work out what was going on. But only one word repeated itself in his head.  
"Malcolm. I want Malcolm,"

**********************************************************************************************************************************************************

Ollie's awake. Ollie's awake. Malcolm can't stop thinking about the phone call from Dr. Addison. Ollie. Is. Actually. AWAKE. At last. He races through the hospital corridors, nearly slipping a few times because of the floor polish. Darn floor polish. Which room? Which one? Oh dang he's- THAT'S IT! THAT'S OLLIE! He runs in and just holds Ollie to his chest. He notices that Ollie's thin arms are around his neck, his freezing cold hands tugging at the thick (but slightly thinning) curls at the back of his head.  
"I've got you now," he whispers in that Scottish accent of his. This is the first time in more than a month that he's felt really comforted.  
"You're okay now, Ollie,"

**Author's Note:**

> Well, I hope you enjoyed that. :)
> 
> If you have any suggestions/requests for fics please put them in the comments below.
> 
> **Please note that I will not complete slash fic requests**
> 
> Fandoms I'm in (just to make my life (and yours) a teeny bit easier and you know what fandoms I'm in (so that when you make requests you'll know what I'm good at doing and know a bit about):  
> Mock The Week  
> QI  
> Would I Lie To You  
> Have I Got News for You  
> Big Fat Quiz of the Year  
> 8 Out of 10 Cats  
> Never Mind the Buzzcocks  
> Bad Education  
> Not Going Out  
> The Thick of It (although I'd very much prefer not to write any sweary bits thank you very much)  
> Top Gear  
> Doctor Who  
> Sherlock  
> Elementary


End file.
